Recently in Remix Media Category

This video does a good job at explaining why we should share what we're doing and then explains the next step.  A Creative Commons license lets you share your work the way you want it to be shared: free for all, no remixing, non-commercial use only, requiring others to share their remixed versions of your work, etc...  Good stuff -- and the video itself is an interesting demonstration of remixed media.

In the midst of putting together some resources for an Online Issues Forum presentation, I thought it would be interesting to discuss the elements of a Creative Commons license, so people would have a better idea of what the symbols mean and what they can do with those resources.  This page on the Creative Commons site is called "Meet the Licenses" and explains each of the combination of license provisions.  For example, the little person means that you need to give credit to the person who created the orginal media.  The dollar sign crossed out means that the media can only be used for noncommercial purposes. So is an educational institution noncommercial?  I found out that the noncommercial provision is being studied now and new guidelines will be released in 2009.  The old draft guidelines say that nonprofit educational institutions fall within noncommercial use.  However, if you modify the content and keep it behind a password, you may be violating other provisions, such as the "share alike" requirement (that's the little circular arrow icon.

At the 2008 Learning Design Summer Camp, Dr. Matt Jackson from the College of Communications talked with us about many topics related to the creation and use of digital media in higher education: Copyright, Fair Use, TEACH Act, mashups, and so forth.  The discussion is at the heart of this copyright site and I think that Matt did a very nice job of explaining the complexity of intellectual property issues.  After the bulk of his presentation, the audience had many questions about issues such as news reporting, making parodies, YouTube, citations, artwork from museums, musical performances, etc...

What can you do if you want to include a photograph in a project or presentation? The American Society of Picture Professionals has created some guidelines that could help you find and contact a photographer who took an image that you would like to use. Also, the online photo sharing service, Flickr, has an advance search which lets you search for images that have a Creative Commons license. A Creative Commons license may permit you to use an image taken by someone else with some restrictions. For example, the photographer may limit their images so they can only be used for non-commercial purposes. In most cases, that includes student projects.

Sandy Thatcher from the Penn State University Press passed along this fair use guide. It was produced by the Center for Social Media. It covers six topics and how they related to "fair use":

• Commenting on or critiquing of copyrighted material
• Using copyrighted material for illustration or example
• Capturing copyrighted material incidentally or accidentally
• Reproducing, reposting, or quoting in order to memorialize, preserve, or discuss an experience, an event, or a cultural phenomenon
• Copying, reposting, and recirculating a work or part of a work for purposes of launching a discussion
• Quoting in order to recombine elements to make a new work that depends for its meaning (often unlikely) relationships between the elements

Determining the copyright status of a published work depends on a lot of factors, even when the author died! This is a very interesting Flash-based tool that helps you determine whether a printed work is protected by copyright or not. There is also a physical version of the copyright slider that you can order if you are so inclined.

This mashup of dozens of Disney cartoons explains the very basic principles of copyright and fair use. Fair warning: the opinions expressed in this video favor the public domain over copyright laws and companies who are profit-driven. The video itself is an interesting case study of fair use. The video wasn't produced by Disney and I seriously doubt that the creators got Disney's permission to use these clips. However, in my non-legal opinion, this is a transformative work. It doesn't compete with the original work and it is educational, a critical commentary, and a parody at the same time. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to be sitting in a court room across from Disney lawyers and have to defend the legality of this video. But personally, I think it is brilliant.

At the 2008 Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium, Lawrence Lessig (law professor, author, and founder of Creative Commons) came to Penn State to give his keynote presentation. He talked for about 45 minutes about current interpretation of copyright law, organizations like the RIAA and MPAA, examples of remixed media, and alternative licenses.

"Fair Use" for legally using media is not black and white. To help sort out the fair use criteria, the University of Minnesota has created an online (or PDF) worksheet to help you determine the extent to which what you would like to do is protected by fair use.

In the third video in this series, Zack talks about how the RIAA lawsuit got him involved with people who are examining the strict interpretation of copyright law, share-friendly licensing (like Creative Commons and open source licensing), remix culture, how digital natives use media. This video was found as part of the Berkman Center blog at Harvard Law.